Frankenstein

< Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus >

Since I first grabbed this book in my hand, I’ve been excited to find out how the main character “creates a life.” Also, I was fascinated by the subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus.” It turns out that the main character is called Victor Prometheus, who was born into a family in Switzerland. All the family stories aside, Victor introduces himself to a life-long friend Henry Clerval, who turns out to be extremely helpful when Frankenstein gets into a very poor state after his experiment.

Before Frankenstein’s first attempt to create a living organism, he shows a great interest in alchemy and studies all the works of well known alchemists, and studies chemistry, especially alchemy like a mad person. This is kind of a foreshadowing, which probably laid the foundation for him to make a “brand-new monster.” In his school Ingolstadt, he meets his mentor, Waldman, a professor who was the only one to truly appreciate Victor’s passionate interest in alchemy. Waldman showed his works and devices he had, and even encouraged Victor to study “every branch of natural philosophy.” Personally, I blame Waldman for all the tragedies in the latter part of this book. If he hadn’t talked to Victor about how valuable his knowledge is, or encouraged Frankenstein to study more in the field, he might not have even tried taking this risk.

Here, as the subtitle indicates, Victor could be compared to Prometheus, who had an obsession for more knowledge about the world of Gods and Goddesses, and about the secrets they had. This guy Victor also has an infinite thirst to know more about life and death and eagerly tries to conquer the world of life and death. Studying night and day on this subject for a long time, he finally gains the confidence for controlling the “life.” Again, like Prometheus, this confidence gave rise to a terrible result, the creation of a troublesome monster. Prometheus also had the confidence that he would be able to save and enlighten the human beings, which led to his own tragedy.

The actual central outline of the story starts when Frankenstein devotes every bit of himself to creating a “new life” in his laboratory. He shuts off his contact from the outside world, even from his own family, throws himself to this scientific experiment, and combines the body parts collected from the morgues and cemeteries. At first, I loved the way he was engrossed in this project, so concentrated and focused as he was. If we observe how all the famous scientists throughout the history were able to create innovative inventions or develop revolutionary ideas, it seemed as if Victor was creating a life that could really be a living creature.

Here, Victor can not only be compared to Prometheus, but he can also be likened to God, who is thought to have made humans. This metaphor can be made because Victor, just like what God did, abandons his new creature without taking any responsibility for what he had done. Both Frankenstein and God try to stop the catastrophic consequences their offsprings had made, but they already had become unstoppable.